A rose by any other name, it appears, will sell better. When there are a bazillion shades of rose cosmetics or crayons or paints on the market, giving them all specific, sometimes strange names is a practical way to tell them apart.

"If I say pink, that's meaningless today," says Margaret Walch, executive director of the Color Association of the United States, which forecasts color trends for various industries.

"But if I say Gwyneth Paltrow Pink, you know right away what I mean," Walch adds, referring to Paltrow's Oscar-ceremony dress. "There's a greater range of colors being used today. So there's a trend toward fancier names."

Nothing is just blue anymore. Increasingly it's not even navy or sky or lapis. Today's color names include Raw, an iridescent purplish-blue nail polish made by Revlon, and Aristocratic, a pastel blue paint offered by Glidden.

Khaki, the color that lent its name to the go-with-everything pants, has spawned cousins such as Stone, Putty, Palomino and Lichen.

Among cosmetics makers, Urban Decay favors names with a high ick factor, such as Gash (blood red) and Roach (dark brown). BeneFit has naughty names like But Officer (peachy brown), Should I Call (ash brown) and Traffic School (bronze).

Then there's Hard Candy, which goes with color names that might appear in a movie starring kids from the WB. Jailbait is iridescent white; Frigid is a glittery ice blue and Trailer Trash is silver.

Who comes up with these names, anyway?

One of them is Linda Trent, who singlehandedly has named all the paints for Sherwin Williams for 18 years. That isn't all she does, but naming colors is one of her favorite job responsibilities.

The tools of her trade include a dictionary, a thesaurus, gardening books and fashion and cooking magazines. Witness colors such as Pomegranate, Wine Country and Sun-Dried Tomato, all of which are reddish.

"We find that if a color has a good descriptor, it really does help a customer understand the ambiance that will result from choosing that color," Trent says.

Urban Putty, for instance, is probably appropriate for a sleek, sophisticated loft with angular furniture and aggressively modern artwork.

"Not that you can't use it in a four-bedroom Colonial in the suburbs," Trent hastily adds. "But it just has that feel about it."

The idea is to communicate with the customer, the Color Association's Walch says.

"You have a name. So I can deal with you," she says. "If you didn't have a name, it would be very difficult for me to deal with you. A color has the same rights."

Colors not only have rights, it seems, but responsibilities. Last month, Crayola renamed its Indian Red crayon Chestnut, to applause from the National Congress of American Indians. It was only the third time in Crayola's 96-year history that the company renamed a color.

Some companies avoid the whole issue--and disregard the conventional wisdom about the market appeal of color names--by numbering their colors. Fashion designer Anna Sui, who recently introduced her own line of makeup, opts for numbers, as does Benjamin Moore paints.

Walch, who prefers names for colors, nonetheless recently used Benjamin Moore to paint her apartment. But the numerical labels irked her. "I believe I used Number 303," she recalls. "Or it could have been 202. There you go. I totally cannot remember. If it had a name, I could remember."

Having previously offended minority groups with Flesh (now Peach) and Indian Red, Crayola seems to now favor wholesome all-American names, like Macaroni and Cheese (orange, of course) and Purple Mountain Majesty (yep, purple).